While Final Cut Pro X (FCPX) looks rather plain at first glance, a lot of its functionality is not immediately obvious. Also Final Cut Pro X does not hit you in the face with preferences screens immediately. This is all part of Apple’s strategy to keep editing accessible for not-too-technically biased people.

Under the surface however, Final Cut Pro X is a mighty powerful NLE which so far has received 28 free updates since its release, most of which were aimed squarely at pro workflows and features.

Introduction

One of the universal laws of media management is that one should always backup the original camera cards before doing anything else with the media.
I agree that you should always have at least three copies of your media — one of which is the copy you’re working with in your NLE and two that sit on a shelf, not connected to a computer and preferably in two different physical locations. Beyond that there are many questions:
Is it really always necessary to have copies of your original cards? What are the best strategies to work with card based media inside Final Cut Pro X? You will have to decide for yourself how to work with media, but I’ll try and give you some options and ideas using FCPX.

Please note: With Camera Cards I mean cards like XQD, SxS or SD cards (or disk images thereof) that have been written by a camera and have the full file structure intact. Final Cut Pro X does not consider SSDs that have been recorded in — for example Atomos recorders — as a camera card. These volumes simply mount as an external volume with video clips on it. Some of the following tips might not work with footage imported from such media.

Let’s start with the basics: Cards, when inserted in a card reader, mount to the desktop of the Mac like any other external storage device. When Final Cut Pro X is running, it immediately shows the Import Media window and lets you choose the clips you want to import into you current library. Use the shortcut Command+Ito open the window manually.

You may have noticed that Final Cut Pro X does not allow Leave files in placeto be ticked. The feature is greyed-out in the interface. FCPX will copy everything you import from a camera card to the current library’s storage location, whether that’s inside its library bundle or in a media storage folder you have defined in the library’s settings.

Not allowing you to reference (link) media into your FCPX library directly from a camera card is a safeguard that makes perfect sense. Otherwise you could inadvertently use media that’s still on you card, edit something, close FCPX, eject the card, format it inside your camera and loose you media before you notice that anything has gone offline in your edit.

TIP: If you are importing from a camera card, you can select ranges of clips and only those ranges will be imported into Final Cut Pro X. You can even command-drag more than one range per clip. That can be extremely useful if you have very long clips and only need to import certain sections from them. This only works with camera cards (or images thereof) — NOT with clips to be imported from regular external volumes with no camera specific file structure!

The ingest will start immediately after you click import. You can start editing whilst Final Cut Pro X is copying the media in the background. Behind the scenes Final Cut Pro X creates aliases (softlinks) to the media files at the current storage location and gradually replaces those with the files in the library storage location when its done copying them.

Interrupted Imports

Because you can already work with media that is currently being copied in the background it’s vitally important to make sure Final Cut Pro X has finished importing media. Do that by checking the Background Tasks window command+9 or Window > Background Tasks.

If (for whatever reason) the import process is interrupted, some of the files might not have been copied over to the storage location. If you fire up Final Cut Pro X while the camera card is still connected to the computer, everything will look fine and you can edit.

TIP: You can identify clips that haven’t been copied to the Libraries storage location yet, by a little camera-symbol in the bottom left of the clip’s thumbnail in the library window.

But as soon as you disconnect the camera card all clips that have not yet been copied off it will go offline! To fix this, you can use File > Import > Reimport from Camera/Archive. This feature allows you to re-start the import one or more clips from an attached camera card.
Connect the card to the computer, select the offline clips in the browser and evoke the command.
Sometimes Final Cut Pro X will show this error message, when you try to re-import from a camera-card or archive:

To solve this problem you might have to open the Import Media window (command+I), navigate to the camera card, select it in the left pane of the window—so it’s contents appear in the lower pane—and close the Import Media window.
Now File > Import > Reimport from Camera/Archive should work.

That was it for the first part of this series. Check back soon for the next part of this ongoing series, where we will go a little deeper into the rabbit-hole.

Florian Gintenreiter is a freelance cinematographer who learned his craft exposing photochemical film. Now he is bringing the same care and diligence from shooting film into today's fast moving digital world.

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Florian Gintenreiter is a freelance cinematographer who learned his craft exposing photochemical film. Now he is bringing the same care and diligence from shooting film into today's fast moving digital world.

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“You may have noticed that Final Cut Pro X does not allow Leave files in place to be ticked. The feature is greyed-out in the interface.”

I actually find this feature really frustrating and wish there was an override. When I copy footage from my FS7 XQD cards to my raid, I like to keep the file structure of the card intact but this causes FCP to recognize it as a camera on import and won’t let me leave the files in place. I would personally never want to let FCP move the files to its internal library structure because it renames the clip files and creates a nightmare for reconnecting footage down the road.
My solution is to pull all the clips out of their folder structure and put them in their own folder. An annoying work around.
Strangely FCP doesn’t mind when I do the same thing with my Red cards. I keep the whole file structure from the SSD intact when copy the footage over and fcp allows leaving the r3d files in place on import.

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January 13, 2019 14:17

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Florian Gintenreiter

I see what you mean, but that would not work with how FinalCutProX manages media. You don’t have to let FinalCutProX suck everything into the library, you could specify an external folder where FinalCutProX will put stuff you import. (More on that in the next part of that tutorial.) Yes RED mags are not treated like “normal” camera cards. I presume it’s because the files themselves contain all the metadata directly. Same with SSDs from Atomos, Blackmagic or Odyssey recorders.

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January 13, 2019 17:50

Member

Stuart Stu

Clearly you need to first grasp the mere BASICS of FCP first then. Since if you’re going to “copy footage from [your] FS7 XQD cards” and “like to keep the file structure of the card intact”… MAKE AN FCP ARCHIVE of it and import from there!! Duh. That’s the whole (brilliant) point of them, since with that you not only have a 1:1 copy of the card, but automatic REDUNDANCY. Since only a total noob would import and work off of the ONLY copy of media he has and not off of copies. Are you a noob?

Otherwise, if you actually insist on doing that, maybe just RENAME THE FOLDER? Then FCP won’t consider it to be a disk anymore. Which is why it doesn’t with the RED disk, as Florian in fact explained in the article. Did you even READ it?

And the whole “because it renames the clip files and creates a nightmare for reconnecting footage down the road” is complete BS as well btw.

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January 13, 2019 20:13

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Florian Gintenreiter

Well actually there is some renaming going on, more than that FinalCutProX rewraps Sony’s .mxf files to into .mov containers, when importing into the library or even into an external media folder, but that’s not a bad thing. I’ll try to explain that in part 2, which will be release soon. If you let FinalCutProX handle your media, there will never be a media reconnection nightmare, because there is no reconnecting needed. Even if you leave FinalCutProX for finishing or grading in Resolve you don’t have reconnect to the cards. Just use the rewrapped movs inside the library or your chosen storage location.

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January 13, 2019 21:08

Member

Stuart Stu

Huh? Since when does a SUFFIX of a file qualify as part of THE NAME? Never mind that if rewrapping happens (which btw does NOT happen with FS7 material anymore), it’ll happen no matter WHERE the material is or is coming from or what your import settings are. So that’s completely irrelevant. And yes, I’m well aware that FCP will change names by adding “(fcp1)” or the likes to the end, but again, it’s complete BULLSHIT that that has any influence on being able to relink or not.

Not sure to whom you are talking to, but I think we’re on the same page here. Can’t confirm your claim that FS-7 footage does not get re-wrapped anymore though. I almost exclusively work with my own FS-7’s footage which is currently still rewrapped into a .mov container. (I’m running the current version of FinalCutProX 10.4.4.). The (fcp1) renaming happens when there is a file with the same name already in the event you are importing to. Something that can easily happen, when importing from certain SLRs or mirrorless cams — they tend to start over with file naming on every now card.

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January 14, 2019 14:57

Member

Stuart Stu

MXF files have imported natively into FCP for a very long time now. And yes, I know WHY they are renamed, the point is that that is totally irrelevant in terms of relinking. If Mr. “Curry” understood the very basic logic behind it all he could save himself a lot of feigned frustration.

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January 14, 2019 16:24

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